In Santiago, we spent our day there mostly on the Cerro San Cristobal with many Santiagan runners, walkers and cyclists. It was Sunday and a bank holiday weekend so the city itself was completely dead - even the museums were closed - and everybody seemed to be making the most of the unseasonable weather. More details here.
We got the bus to Valparaiso on the coast on Monday morning and stayed in the beautiful old Cerro Allegre area. The city is made up of the flat business district by the ocean and surrounded by many steep hills that contain the residential areas. It is small enough to walk around most of the city but some roads are very steep. We visited the open air art gallery which is a few streets of murals on the walls of buildings in Cerro Conception, the house of Pablo Neruda - a famous poet and walked around a self guided tour of Cerro Conception and Cerro Allegre. The houses are all very colourfully painted and on a sunny day the city is very pretty.
After a few days in Valparaiso we took a bus up the coast to La Serena. This is a seaside resort and town at the mouth of the Elqui Valley. This part of Chile is semi desert and the Elqui Valley is one of several fertile corridors used for agriculture. We did an Elqui Valley day trip bus tour that took us to a papaya farm, the Poclaro dam, a pisco distillery, a couple of nice villages and lunch in a solar oven restaurant. In the lower parts of the valley many fruits and vegetables are grown while at higher altitudes the crops are mostly grapes (wine, table or pisco) and some avocado. This is the only place in the world that can produce Pisco and call it Pisco. This is because even though the Peruvians first made the spirit, the Chileans patented it!
We did the tour with Elqui Valley Tours booked through the El Punto hostel. We wanted to do this tour joint with the evening Mamalluca observatory tour and were expecting to be dropped off in Vicuna village with time to get dinner and then be picked up and taken to the observatory later. However, at about 5pm our guide told us that there was noone else who wanted to do the observatory tour so he had to take us all the way back to La Serena. This was quite annoying as if we had known this we would have stayed the night in Vicuna instead of La Serena so we could organise the transport to the nearly observatory ourselves. Luckily we did make it back to La Serena with enough time to find and book private transport up to the observatory. We did end up spending oover 2 hours extra on the same road though. The observatory is specifically for tourists and has a 14 inch Meade telescope in a dome and a smaller telescope outside. It is a good introduction to the Southern night sky and we saw Saturn, the Orion nebula and the tarantula nebula amongst other things. The group size was only 9 when we went which was nice and small. The night sky is this part of Chile is the clearest in the world because of the climate, low population density and altitude. Many of the world's largest telescopes are located here.
From La Serena we took a 16 hour overnight TurBus to San Pedro de Atacama in the middle of the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth. This is a dusty tourist focussed village dominated by hostels and tour companies. It is hot and sunny in the daytime and freezing at night. We did three tours in the day and half we spent here, the Valle de la Luna, El Tatio geysers and the SPACE (San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Expeditions) tour. The first two are the dominant tours. The Valle de la Luna goes to several places with interesting rock formations formed by the wind and ancient water flow and salt formations and then you climb up a giant sand dune (on a rocky path to the side) to watch the sunset. We chose Desert Adventures as our tour company. The tour was good but the group size was rather large at 27 people. The views and rock formations are stunning and the salt canyons very interesting.
The El Tatio tour starts at 4 am (however we weren't picked up until after 4:30) for a drive up to over 4200m to see the geysers and thermal pools on the sides of the volcanoes. The geysers are at their best just before sunrise hence the early start. Breakfast is included in the tour and we had warm chocolate milk and hard boiled eggs which we think were heated in the geysers! On the way down the tour makes several stops to look at wildlife (vicunas, viscachas and waterbirds on a surprising wetland area) and see an indigenous village, Machuca.
In the evening we did the SPACE tour. This is run by a French astronomer who has a great setup of 10 telescopes all focussed on different night sky items for use on the tour and also has a few domed telescopes we didn't see. He is very enthusiatic and funny and again this was a good introduction to the night sky. We also we able to see the moon and he helped everyone who wanted to get a photo through the telscope. Unfortunately the group size was rather large for this type of tour, about 30 people, which made it hard to use the telescopes as much as I would've liked.
We left San Pedro the next morning on the Pullman bus to Salta. Pullman don't have an office in San Pedro and you can't buy a online ticket for this route so we just waited by the side of the road and hoped the the bus would actually turn up and have enough seats for us and the other couple waiting! It did and we headed out of Chile for the last time. This bus journey is amazing. It goes up to nearly 5000m through the Jama Pass into Argentina. It crosses salt flats goes close to 6000m volcanoes and though gorges and past brightly coloured rocks and cliffs. It takes nearly 11 hours including the time spent at the border crossings but is well worth doing.
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